Squid Game's Evil VIPs Are Still the Show's Worst Characters

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for Squid Game Season 3. Read at your own risk!]

"A mother will do anything to save her child," remarks one of the VIP spectators in Squid Game's third season. In the previous episode, a pregnant contestant gave birth in the middle of a challenge, and now the VIPs are debating how this might affect the competition. With morbid humor, this guy speculates that threatening the baby's life might turn her mother into "some kind of Marvel superhero," giving her an edge against her opponents.

"Like Wonder Woman?" asks one of his companions.

"That's actually a DC superhero," corrects a third VIP. "But anyways…"

This kind of unwieldy pop culture reference would barely muster a smirk at the best of times, but in Squid Game it's doubly awkward, joining a litany of moments when the VIP characters interrupt the action with stilted acting and cringeworthy dialogue. It's hard to understand why we keep coming back to them at all — especially once we reach the series finale, where there's zero payoff for their recurring presence in the show.

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Back in Season 1, the VIPs were already a noticeable weak spot. Donning bejeweled masks to swill cocktails and place bets from a private viewing area, they're a group of bloodthirsty voyeurs. Within the show's gruesome capitalist allegory, they embody the selfish, heartless stupidity of the super-rich, alienated from everyday human suffering thanks to their obscene levels of wealth. While the games' Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) and his staff do all the legwork, the VIPs are just passive consumers of the Squid Game product. But it's hard to focus on their thematic purpose when their scenes are so jarringly amateurish to watch.

Played by some of the very few non-Korean performers in the cast, Season 1's VIPs faced criticism for their subpar acting — an issue that was ultimately blamed on several factors, including poorly translated dialogue and the actors being given very little context for their roles. Netflix seemingly struggled to find a decent caliber of Western actors in South Korea (a problem that isn't unique to Squid Game), and their screen time became an embarrassing blip in an otherwise well-crafted drama.

Squid Game creator, writer, and director Hwang Dong-hyuk is well aware of the complaints. Speaking to TV Guide, he said that Season 1 used non-professional actors in these roles, and that for Season 3, they "tried to cast the best, capable actors as VIPs." (In fact several of Season 1's VIPs had already appeared in multiple South Korean projects, playing bit parts in movies like Train to Busan: Peninsula and Netflix's Space Sweepers.)

Regrettably, the new cast isn't much of an improvement. Season 3's VIPs — led by a middle-aged Englishman (David Sayers), a young Chinese woman (Jane Wong), and a long-haired Italian guy (Bryan Bucco) — do have some other screen credits under their belts, but they still fail to deliver their lines in a convincing manner. And since they play a more significant role than their predecessors, their shortcomings are more noticeable. Every time we cut back to VIPs, we're treated to another round of witless commentary and wooden acting, sabotaging the high-stakes tension of the games. More often than not, they're just sharing banal statements like, "It won't be easy to eliminate Player 125," which invariably feels like a waste of time. 

The frustrating thing is that we don't actually need to see this much of the VIPs. The show barely bothers to develop them as individual characters, and they have minimal impact on the plot. All of their scenes just reiterate the same point: Poisoned by a life of perpetual luxury, these people have lost touch with their humanity, and are painfully stupid to boot. It's a simple message that doesn't get more interesting with repetition, lacking the bite of wealth-based satires like Knives Out or The White Lotus.

This isn't to say that Squid Game's billionaires need to be smart or psychologically complex. Given what they're paying to watch, it makes sense for them to be a group of jeeringly repugnant airheads. However, they're still the one point where Squid Game's class commentary falls flat — not just in the sense that these characters have nothing to say, but in the basic incompetence of how their scenes unfold.

If anything, the most interesting element of the VIPs' role is entirely subtextual and doesn't even require them to appear on screen.

By now, we're pretty familiar with the internal workings of the games, from the humiliating recruitment process to the unsettling design of the challenges, orchestrated by the Front Man and his army of masked guards. It's an exquisite logistical achievement, and to be frank it's wasted on its VIP audience, who don't even give the games their full attention. More to the point, they lack the emotional intelligence to appreciate the full scope of the Front Man's manipulations. Crafting a bespoke torture chamber for hundreds of victims each year, he's clearly a lot smarter than his boorish employers — and he uses all that intellect to build a monstrous edifice of pointless sadism.

Whenever we take a peek behind the curtain, that's the most disturbing component of Squid Game's class allegory — not the VIPs themselves, who are basically one-note caricatures. They'd be better off with just one or two scenes: enough time to highlight their thoughtless cruelty, but not so much that their clumsy performances get distracting. 

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Tellingly, after a four-episode arc where they contribute nothing to the show, the VIPs don't even get a proper send-off. As the games conclude and the Front Man triggers a bomb to destroy their island HQ, the VIPs evacuate off screen. Considering the bleak tone of the finale — an ending that reinforces the institutional power of the games and kills off the story's hero — it feels depressingly appropriate that the VIPs survive unscathed, facing no consequences for the bloodbath they just facilitated. But while they're important to Squid Game's allegorical world-building, most of their actual screen time would be better off on the cutting room floor, allowing us to focus our attention on the characters who actually matter.

The third and final season of Squid Game is now streaming on Netflix.